YoungWizardsNewMEditionpuzzle_complete_largeIn honor of my forthcoming live interview with Diane Duane at noon today, I’ve gone back through our coverage of her over the last few years to pull up some of the more interesting stories. (These aren’t all of them; just the ones I thought were worthy of calling out.)

Feel free to read some of these for a backgrounder before you join us for the podcast. Don’t forget, we’re giving away a set of Young Wizards New Millennium Edition e-books to one of our participants today!

I also interviewed Duane in 2006 on my podcast The Biblio File, about her The Big Meow project.

Diane Duane’s Middle Kingdoms series available as DRM-free e-books (August 22, 2010)

This piece discusses the availability of Duane’s three Middle Kingdoms books, DRM-free, on her e-book store. She later reissued them in a revised version; they’re now available as a 3-in-1 omnibus.

Of Street Performers and Storytellers’ Bowls: Diane Duane completes The Big Meow draft (February 2, 2011)

This discusses the five-year history of the crowdfunded The Big Meow novel, and why it took quite so long for her to finish.

(Diane Duane has advised me she will be unable to answer follow-up questions about this project during our interview today, as there are things going on with it that she can’t discuss.)

Review: The Young Wizards series and The Big Meow by Dianeō Duane (March 5, 2011)

This is my overall review of the Young Wizards/Feline Wizardry series as a whole, as it was at the time. Needless to say, I still highly recommend the books!

Ongoing publisher inattention to e-book quality is highly annoying (March 13, 2011)

This post, discussing the many typographical errors I found in the original editions of the Young Wizards books, grew out of my experience rereading all the books for my review.

Diane Duane on e-book self-publishing and quality (March 15, 2011)

This covered a blog post Diane Duane herself made concerning the issue and what was being done to resolve it. Thankfully, the e-books were later reissued in corrected editions.

Why Penguin and Diane Duane just lost a sale (March 18, 2011)

This was me complaining that the e-book of Diane Duane’s futuristic MMORPG novel, Omnitopia Dawn, was unreasonably priced on Amazon at the publisher’s behest. It is much more reasonably priced by now, of course. Now if only the sequel wasn’t scheduled for ten years away…

(Diane Duane has advised me she will be unable to answer follow-up questions about this project during our interview today, as there are things going on with it that she can’t discuss.)

Pricing puzzler: Diane Duane finds e-book sells better at $4.99 than $1.99 (May 16, 2011)

In pricing experimentation on her store, Diane Duane discovered that, somewhat counterintuitively, e-books can sell better when they’re higher-priced—something that other writers’ experimentation elsewhere has also borne out.

Diane Duane discusses revisions to early Young Wizards novels (May 30, 2011)

Diane Duane discussed what moved her to rewrite the earlier volumes of her Young Wizards series to give them a more consistent and recent chronology. (Joanna later covered the revisions as well, and I reviewed the first changed novel.)

Diane Duane will write The Door into Starlight if fans can prove interest (July 17, 2011)

Shortly after publishing revisions of the original Middle Kingdoms e-books, Diane Duane posted that, if her blog post was shared to enough places, she would contrive to write the long-awaited fourth book in this series. (I look forward to asking her today about how well-shared this post was in the end.)

The Internet Archive’s Open Library is violating authors’ copyrights (July 10, 2013)

I was moved to write this piece when I noticed the Internet Archive’s OpenLibrary program was permitting unauthorized library-style check-outs of various authors’ e-books, including Duane’s XCOM tie-in novel (which is still available).

Diane Duane holds Cyber Monday sale; may have to close e-book store (November 30, 2014)

This piece came out at the end of last year when the new VAT MOSS rules made it likely Diane Duane would have to close her e-book store down at the end of the year. Happily, she hasn’t; I look forward to asking her about that during our interview, too.

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